This paper investigates the implications of the Grossman-Stiglitz (1980) model on the informational efficiency of financial markets for the optimality of the allocation of talent to financial trading versus entrepreneurship. Informed traders make the financial market more informationally...

The most fundamental proposition about growth and competition is that there is a tradeoff between static welfare and long-term growth. This paper reconsiders this basic proposition in an increasing product variety endogenous growth model with competitive markets for 'old' innovative products and...

Microfinance currently experiences a huge inflow of private investors and a surge in the use of market instruments. This raises the question of what market equilibria in microfinance markets look like and which kinds of market failure tend to afflict them. The present paper conducts an...

The entry of a low-wage country into a world economy with pre-existing wage differentials puts the gains from trade in a former low-wage and then medium-wage country under pressure. If negotiations over the formation of a free trade area cover international transfers, there is a strong...

Do all types of information benefit the efficiency of prices in the sense that they drive them closer to fundamentals compared to the situation where information does not exist? Looking at the competitive noisy rational expectations framework, the clear answer of the literature is: yes. It...

DeLong (1990a) et al. show that in the presence of positive feedback traders rational speculation can be destabilizing, in that it drives the price of a risky asset above its expected value. A generalization of their seminal model with additional trading dates and an additional informative...

Microborrowers may take usurious loans to repay a loan taken from a micro nance institution because of having neglected the time inconsistency of optimal plans or having discounted future payoffs too strongly from the ex-post perspective. Microfinance programs should strive at preventing such...

This paper analyzes a model in which housing tenure choice serves as a means of screening households with different utilization rates. If the proportion of low-utilization types is small, there is a separating equilibrium at which tenure choice acts as a screening device: consistent with...

This paper analyzes a North-South trade model with costly offshoring and equilibrium unemployment due to union wage setting. Reductions in the amount of resources required in the offshoring process usually decrease employment, though the opposite can happen at a low initial level of offshoring...

In a paper in this journal, Schnabel and Roumi (1989) assert that if uninsured debt is risky, a levered firm takes a casualty insurance with a positive safety loading if, and only if, the amount of debt is sufficiently high. This note shows that, in marked contrast to this assertion, the correct...